The New Uncanny Read Free

impudently quizzical. ‘You’ve seen ours.’
    He was glad if they assumed he’d been squinting in the dimness of the hotel bar only at the badges pinned above their long slim thighs. Each badge bore the image of a winged young woman dressed in a chain-mail bikini and a virtually transparent robe, an outfit both girls had copied apart from the wings. The sword in her hand indicated their names, Primmy and Barbaria. ‘Edwin Ferguson,’ he said.
    ‘That’s an old name,’ Primmy commented.
    ‘You need to be old to know all the tricks.’
    ‘I like a good trick, don’t you, Primmy? Are you going to show us yours, Edwin?’
    However guilty he couldn’t help feeling, he thought he might feel worse if he let the opportunity pass. ‘I only give private performances,’ he said.
    ‘Is it going to be all for us?’ Primmy cried.
    Barbaria bent her head and an eyebrow towards her, prompting Ferguson to assure the girls ‘It’s all right, I didn’t think you were angels.’
    ‘Why not?’ Primmy demanded.
    He pointed at her badge – at least, he hoped it was clear that was where he was pointing. ‘No wings.’
    ‘Sometimes we are,’ Barbaria said. ‘We can be all kinds.’
    ‘Depends who we’re with.’
    ‘I’m looking forward to finding out. What roles you like playing, I mean.’
    He made the sudden silence the occasion for a sip of Scotch followed by a larger one. ‘You’re looking at them,’ Barbaria said.
    ‘And they’re all you’ll be seeing,’ Primmy said.
    He was able to mistake this for a promise until they turned away as a man strolled into the bar. He was at least as old as Ferguson and even stouter, with greying hair that Ferguson thought far too long for his age. Nevertheless the girls stood up eagerly, although Primmy lingered to say ‘Thanks for the fun.’
    ‘Is that all?’ When she tried to appear prim instead of primitive Ferguson was provoked to add ‘Maybe you shouldn’t come out in public dressed like that. You might give some people the wrong idea.’
    ‘We were at the masquerade.’
    ‘You’ve been doing some of that all right.’ Loud enough for her to catch he said, ‘And what do you get up to the rest of the time?’
    Barbaria turned long enough to inform him ‘We’re social workers.’
    ‘Is that what they call it these days?’ he might have retorted except for feeling obsolete. As the girls each took the newcomer by an arm Ferguson saw that the man’s badge depicted a bronzed bruiser in sandals and loincloth and crown, who was brandishing a blade at a lengthy name Ferguson felt expected to recognise. He drained his Scotch and murmured to the barman ‘Who’s he?’
    ‘One of their writers.’
    In his sleeveless denim outfit the fellow didn’t look much like one, or his age. Was being a writer all it took to have girls hanging on your arms? Perhaps now Ferguson had time to write the book he imagined he contained, the rest would follow. The idea seemed so variously disloyal that he felt his face glow like the light of a brake he’d applied too belatedly to himself, and he hurried not much better than blindly out of the bar.
    He hadn’t reached the lifts when the lobby grew loudly crowded with people emerging from the conference suite. While a few were fantastically costumed, most struck him as not much less anonymous and awkward than himself. The hotel notice-board identified their event as a Fantasy Weekend, but it didn’t mean the kind of fantasy he’d yielded to imagining. At least, it certainly didn’t for him.
    He kept his back to the mirror in the lift once he’d jabbed the button. On its way the lift opened to admit a view of the second-floor corridor, where badged individuals and their noise and drinks were spilling out of a room. For a moment he wished he were in there, but the room sounded too small for the revellers who were. That was one reason why the wish fell away before the corridor did.
    The adjacent lift had just delivered someone to the